Best American Essays of the Century wraps up the creme de la creme of essay writing from 1901 - 1997. Beginning with Mark Twain ("Corn-pone Opinions") and ending with Saul Bellow ("Graven Images.") ( )

"I've never been great at writing book reviews, nevertheless, I want write about The Best American Essays of the Century. One of its main themes is about the relationship of between black and whites, as there are essays such as: Of the Coming John by W. E. B. Du Bois, Coatsville by John Jay Adams, Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr., and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. There are a few more in reference to this topic, but you get the idea.

The most interesting one for me is Coatesville. The essay is about how a town is guilty in horrifically lynching a black man in Coatsville, Pennsylvania, and how America needs to repent of their "wickedness" in the slave trade for no European country has never done such an evil thing as Coatsville.

In 1911, Adams went there to deliver his Coatsville message at a prayer meeting one year after the incident, and only two people showed up, but fortunately it was later published in Harper's Weekly in 1912.

Furthermore, The Handicapped by Randolph Bourne, Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, and Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood by Adrienne Rich give their perspective on being a minority. The rest are a hodge podge of everything else. Most all of them are enjoyable to read, and inspire me to write more."

What makes this collection the best of essays is that Oates takes care to identify those essays that speak to the historical, political, and personal experience of America in the 20th century. In this collection you'll find Eliot, Hurston, Fitzgerald, McCarthy, Baldwin, King, Kingston, Didion, Nabokov, Updike, Bellow, Rich and more. She shys away from nothing. I could find nothing missing. There are books that we buy and gobble up and there are those that we savour. You'll do both with this collection. I always have it close at hand. When I need to be reminded of how an essay reads in a masters voice, I pick up Oates' collection. ( )

Fifty years ago, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it.

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But for a one-nose job, the bust in the Chicago library isn't at all bad.

Wikipedia in English (1)

The title The Best American Essays of the Century seems transparent enough, but don't be deceived. What Joyce Carol Oates has assembled is not so much a diverse collection as a sonorous march through what keeps getting called the American century. Read this not as a collection to dip into but as a history--a history of race in America. Oates says it best herself in her introduction: "It can't be an accident that essays in this volume by men and women of ethnic minority backgrounds are outstanding; to paraphrase Melville, to write a 'mighty' work of prose you must have a 'mighty' theme." The mighty pens at work here belong to, among others, Zora Neale Hurston ("How It Feels to Be Colored Me"), Langston Hughes ("Bop"), and James Baldwin ("Notes of a Native Son"). Oates has opted not for the most unexpected but for the most important and stirring essays of our time.

Other chords sound repeatedly as well: the problem of our relationship with nature (Annie Dillard, John Muir, and Gretel Ehrlich); the difficulty of identity in disrupted times (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, and Michael Herr). In her essay "The White Album," Didion famously declares: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." The stories Oates has collected are not easy. Here is the hard-won truth, from writers unwilling to forgive even themselves. Even Martin Luther King Jr. doesn't let himself off the hook, as he writes in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail": "If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me." --Claire Dederer